Hinterland: A Novel by Caroline Brothers Page A

feet; the old woman feeding them in silence at the kitchen table; Kabir’s face in the dashboard light when the truck driver brought him back to the farm. He remembers the smell of earth under the truck’s tarpaulin and Kabir awash in the aquarium light, and the student with the pointy hair who helped them in the metro. He lets his thoughts run with the water until it starts to turn cold and washes them down the half-choked drain.
    Flowers of rust decorate the mirror that is covered in fog. Aryan traces a line across it with his finger and watches the drips race to descend. He dries himself with the scratchy towel that is too meagre to wrap around his hips, and pulls his dirty clothes back on. For the first time in months his body feels almost relaxed.
    He pads back to their room along the tiled corridor and pushes open the door.
    The room is empty.
    Aryan seizes the key, slams the door behind him and flings himself down the staircase three steps at once. He slips on the foot-polished surface; manages to clutch the banister just in time. His heart slams against his ribcage like a drowning man.
    Between gasps for air he tries to calculate how many minutes have passed, how far a small boy could have gone.
    There is no one in the foyer; even the scar-faced receptionist has disappeared.
    In the street he looks left and right, blinking in the glare, scanning the known world for a sign. Where, he thinks, where? The road is choked with traffic; his view is blocked by a stream of yellow taxis and white-windowed delivery vans. The sick feeling he remembers from the last time they were separated overwhelms him. The only place he can imagine is the park; panicked, he retraces their steps.
    And then he sees him, sitting on a bench between the trees. He is watching a gang of children chase a football, a black-and-white dog yapping at their heels. In the glaring sunshine, Kabir looks forlorn.
    Aryan leans forward, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. He can feel his heart pounding through the wash of relief.
    He sinks beside his brother on the bench. It is a while before he can talk; his mouth is sour with the aftertaste of panic.
    ‘Don’t do that,’ Aryan says after a while.
    ‘I only went for a walk.’
    ‘I thought I’d lost you again.’
     
    The first agent they meet looks scarcely older than Aryan. He has slicked-back hair and a nervous tic and mobile phones he juggles in each hand. He promises to get them to Italy for two thousand eight hundred euros.
    Two thousand eight hundred euros, Aryan thinks. The number makes him feel weak. That is not the price they had calculated back in Iran, when he had discussed the cost of the journey, including bribes and agents’ fees, with a man his uncle knew who had made it as far as Austria before getting sent back.
    ‘Beware of the kidnap places inside Iran,’ the man had said. ‘Beware of the hostage takers who will beat you and imprison you until your relatives send more money. Beware of the intermediaries along the way, the heroin addicts and the small-town profiteers who will try to make you pay a second time for things already included in the price. And above all, beware of the smugglers. Your life is in their hands – remember to never, ever look them in the eye.’
    The receptionist sets up a meeting with another agent. Aryan kicks Kabir under the counter; he cannot stop staring at the man’s scar.
    A six-foot Kurd, the agent looks more like a warrior than a smuggler. He reminds Aryan of the gun-swinging horsemen who led them, on foot, over the mountains into Turkey, toting drugs with their barrels of oil. The man leers when he speaks and proposes a deal that Aryan instinctively mistrusts: two thousand nine hundred euros to guarantee their arrival in Rome.
    When a third one sets the same price, tapping the figure into his calculator with a carpet seller’s practised panache, Aryan tells the man it’s too much. He hasn’t got any solutions, but they will find some other